Professionalization Panel with Anastasia Eccles, Alanna Hickey, and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay.
Anastasia Eccles works on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, with particular interests in theories of reading, the novel, and the long history of formalism. Her book project examines modes of reading cultivated by a group of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels and tales, asking what aesthetic experiences like being held in suspense, feeling complicit, or longing for a different plot have to do with living in a political collective. She has also written on the reception of Laurence Sterne in Russia, and is working on a co-authored manuscript on suspense and the digital humanities with members of the Stanford Literary Lab. This year she is teaching courses in the history of poetry, narrative suspense, and Jane Austen and Walter Scott.
Alanna Hickey’s research and teaching focuses on intersections between early American literatures, poetry and poetics, Native American and Indigenous studies, and settler colonial studies. She is revising a book manuscript that uncovers the central role of poetry in Native American expressive cultures before the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s. Her essays have appeared in Studies in American Indian Literatures and the Iowa Review. She is currently working on a project about the fiftieth anniversary of the Occupation of Alcatraz, and the literary publications surrounding the protest movement then and now. Before joining the English Department, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay studies the literary history of the colonial world, primarily of South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of her research explores practices of reading in this period, focusing on situations that challenge our notions of what it means to read and who is a reader. Some of these concerns are addressed in her current book project, in which she argues that colonial subjectivities were formed not by an intense engagement with writers such as Milton and Hume, but rather, through superficial and fleeting relationships with the most mundane of textual forms, such as the petition, almanac, and instruction manual, among others. She has also begun work on a second project on the multimedia history of the lecture at the turn of the twentieth century, placing it in the early context of anti-colonialism as a global movement. Her research has appeared in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Victorian Culture, and the edited volume, Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. She is also a co-editor of The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices, a collection of essays that seeks to explore some of the ways in which books travel across national and linguistic borders. Before coming to Yale, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.